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The CMS announced that about 17.3 million Medicare patients received one or more preventive services without paying out-of-pocket costs in the first half of this year under the conditions of the Affordable Care Act. More Medicare patients were also able to take advantage of the 50% discount on brand-name prescription drugs as well as the free mammograms and colorectal screenings, officials said.

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Prof. John A. Rogers of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has created a stretchable, ultra-thin device, which can be attached to the skin like a tattoo, to enable noninvasive diagnosis and observation of diseases including heart arrhythmia and sleep disorders. The device uses sensors to measure temperature, strain and electric signals from the patient's body.

More insurance providers are leveraging social media to expand their services. Humana recently unveiled its own social hub called Humanaville to enable consumers to engage in discussion forums or post insurance queries, while Independence Blue Cross expanded its Healthy Steps social media effort by developing a smartphone solution that allows consumers to track and share their health progress on Twitter and Facebook.

Dr. Martin Levine, president of the American Osteopathic Association, said that about 55% of osteopathy practitioners enter primary care settings, while another 10% opt for internal medicine or pediatrics. Levine said that although shortages in primary care doctors may happen in the future, family medicine is still expected to provide the most care.

Ironwood Pharmaceuticals' drug candidate linaclotide met the primary endpoint of improving bowel habit in patients with chronic constipation during two company-funded trials. Significantly more patients taking 145 or 290 micrograms of the drug had at least three spontaneous bowel movements weekly over three months compared with placebo users. In addition, linaclotide lessened the severity of constipation, bloating and abdominal discomfort.

Fifty-nine percent of about 1,000 cancer patients said they had symptoms of insomnia during treatment, while almost half of those who had symptoms met the criteria for insomnia syndrome, according to a Canadian study in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. One in seven patients exhibited symptoms of the sleep condition during the first months following surgery, researchers found.